1. Field
The present disclosure relates to computer-generated animation and, more specifically, to applying lighting correction filters to computer-generated animation to correct lighting therein.
2. Related Art
A computer-generated scene can be created by rendering one or more computer-generated objects to depict the scene. Light sources, materials, textures, and other visual effects can be associated with the objects to create a realistic visual appearance for the scene. A render setup graph can be used to define the objects and their associated visual effects to be rendered. The graph can typically include one or more interconnected nodes associating the objects and their visual effects, where a node wire can pass the objects and visual effects from node to node for processing. Building the render setup graph can typically be the final animation step prior to rendering.
In some instances, the rendered scene can have small areas in which the lighting (or other visual effects) requires correction to provide a more realistic appearance, e.g., to cast a smaller shadow, to have more lighting around the eyes, and the like. Whereas, the remainder of the scene needs no correction. A traditional approach to correct the small areas has been to correct the lighting at issue, re-associate the object with the corrected lighting, update the render setup graph with the new association, and then re-render the scene, this time with the lighting corrected. An alternate approach has been to create a matte for the small areas at issue and apply the matte to the areas during the scene compositing step. However, both approaches waste substantial time and computational resources to redo areas of the scene that needed no correction in order to correct the small areas that did.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient way to correct lighting (and other visual effects) in small areas of a computer-generated scene.